Here Come the Drones

Now that commercial drones have navigated Washington, they should be headed for a town — or work site — near you.

What then?

As Cecilia Kang writes, the Federal Aviation Administration has issued rules for how companies can use unmanned aircraft. There is nothing too surprising in the long-awaited rules — you have to be over 16, pass a written test and can’t fly too high or near an airport — but just having them means companies can start making small and cheap vehicles a part of ordinary working life.

Expectations are for uses like aerial photography or the inspection of building sites and pipelines, but technology frequently has a way of trumping expectations. Maybe drones will fly over parking lots and map the heat of parked cars, to tell how long people are shopping. Maybe some kind of quadcopter crop or animal management is in the offing.

If a lot of uses arise, without too many problems, it’s likely the government will allow for additional drone uses, like package delivery or emergency rescue with larger vehicles. Laws and regulations, after all, tend to reflect changing social expectations.

The drone business certainly acts like there is more to come. There are start-ups in Silicon Valley offering operating systems as well as vehicle makers that encourage people to experiment with their aircraft. In effect, they are software companies that hope the hacker ethos of computing (try lots of stuff, make unexpected innovations at a furious clip) can take to the skies.

In rural states there are other business ideas, which will have their own boost from the F.A.A. decision to approve commercial drones. North Dakota, which already has perhaps the world’s leading pilot school, is training drone pilots and fostering start-ups aimed at the agriculture world.

Upstate New York has companies working on remote sensing systems. One probable outcome is that drones will, once we’re habituated to them, fly great distances with no human keeping an eye on them.

Of course, companies like Amazon are interested in the possibility of drone delivery of consumer goods. Google seems to view drones for that, but also as supreme data collectors that could help turn Google Maps into a three-dimensional monitor of the world, in real time.

The question now is when, not if. The F.A.A. by nature works more with companies than with the general public, so it would take a lot of citizen discontent to stop the drones. The bigger challenge will come from local communities, which are more responsive to individual complaints.